80 great quotes about love and romance: from Adam and Eve to chemsex

"I measured love by the extent of my jealousy"
(Graham Greene, The End of the Affair)

TRISTAN AND ISOLDE is one of the great love stories of the 19th century, but boy is it a test of endurance for your bum cheeks. At five hours long, Richard Wagner's 1859 opera – described by Leonard Bernstein as “the central work of all music history" – is a risky choice for a night out on a first date. German Wagner was 46 when he wrote a complex opera that was pronounced "unperformable" at the time. It's about the love affair between Tristan, a Breton nobleman, and Isolde, an Irish princess betrothed to Marke, the King of Cornwall. He is eventually cuckolded. The first 70 shows of the opera in Vienna were cancelled. It was finally premiered in Munich in 1865, conducted by the Hans von Bülow. And what happened to von Bülow? He was the man Wagner would later cuckold. Above, Sophia Myles and James Franco star in the 2005 film version.